I’m reading up on Mass Effect, a game which is being produced by Bioware and has every indication of being exqusite. The game follows the time-honored tradition of giving you a spaceship and a crew, and letting you use these resources to save the galaxy. I’ve been saving the galaxy since Starflight in the late 8o’s, and I can tell you that galaxy-saving just doesn’t get old. It’s XBox 360-only, but if previous trends continue then the game will end up on the PC within the next couple of years.

However, if other previous trends continue, then in three years Obsidian will come out with Mass Effect 2, a game which will trap you on a spaceship with a crew of dysfunctional morons and sociopaths who all hate you yet still call you their captain for no discernable reason. The gameplay will consist of navigating dialog trees which insult or infuriate you in various ways, for sixty hours, until your ship at last crashes into the sun and the game ends.

27 thoughts on “Mass Effect”

The fact that it already says it is the first in a trilogy gives it high hopes…unless they couldn’t fit the whole game onto one DVD for XBox360.

Personally, I think the game of the year is going to be Crysis, provided they don’t overshoot their goals and the game is actually playable on a machine that exists or that I could build for less than $1000 for the tower. http://www.crysis-game.com/

You know, you should rig up some sort of counter, like the nifty one with dice for the number of posts, that keeps a running tab of how many oblique references you make to your disappointment with Neverwinter Nights 2. Plus, I think finding ways to twist any given topic to get a shot in at NWN2 is a much more worthwhile puzzle than the one with celebrity names. Keep ’em coming!

KotOR and NWN were intellectual properties licensed to Bioware by Hasbro for their games. This opens the door to all sorts of development control issues (for instance, in order for the games to be considered Canon at any level, the IP owner’s oversight is required on every tiny detail). It seems that Bioware doesn’t particularly enjoy this situation, as they’ve been chomping at the bit over the last few years to be rid of it. Last time I checked, all of their upcoming stuff is proprietary IP, stuff they came up with on their own, so I think the chance of the sequels being passed on to someone else is lower than normal.

You forgot the part when you have to sell 3 pints of blood to obsidian to get the 32 digit keycode, that allows you access to the download from their website that decrypts the game you paid 79.95 for, so that you can play the game when/if their server is running to verify your game. Then of course there are the 5 “patches” that you HAVE to download that will only cost you one additional pint of usable body fluids, one week in a drug testing facility or you can pay up front for all future “patches” and ” access to Obsidian’s online gaming community!…” for a non-vital organ to be sold on the black market.

I tend to agree with the sentiments about Obsidian. I was willing to give them a one-time pass on the problems with KOTOR 2. “First big game, all kinds of pressure from massive LucasArts… OK, I can see why they screwed it up in order to get it out early.”

Then NWN2 came out. And I discovered the ending of KOTOR 2 wasn’t a screw-up, it was a trend!

I find this hilariously accurate, a little over three years later. Sure, ME2 didn’t match up to ALL of your predictions, but it was close. Sure, most of your crew had a reason to call you captain, but about a quarter of them were sociopaths, many of the dialogue choices resulted in the same thing, and, well, there’s the ending…

And of course the fact that BioWare managed to screw things up all by themselves this time, so no blaming Obsidian. Insert: ‘Blah blah someone says something about EA ruining them.’ EA absolutely didn’t help, but they ruined themselves.